This story brought to mind something my grandmother used to say: “People in hell want ice water.”
The implication, of course, is that they’re not gonna get it.
Archive for September, 2005
That’s how John Podhoretz describes New York Times reporter Judith Miller’s release from prison yesterday after she agreed to testify before the grand jury in the nadagate affair.
I hope some day somebody writes all this down, because the whole story is unbelievable. Miller never writes a story about Plamegate, but insists she must keep her sources secret, even though the name of her primary source, Cheney chief of staff Scooter Libby, has long since been a matter of public record — and has publicly released her from her pledge of anonymity. She decides to go to jail to protect the principle of source anonymity, and is only weeks away from being sprung (because the grand jury she was refusing to talk to will go out of business in Ocrober) before she abandons her stand on principle and decides to talk. And all this in relation to a matter that may well not have been a crime to begin with. Weird wacko crazy bananas.
I concur. The Times is just one big nuthouse.
The Los Angeles Times has a couple of articles on the San Diego Union-Tribune and publisher David Copley.
I’m not going to comment on any of this (because I have a mortgage payment) except to say that I’ve worked at the Union-Tribune for five years next month — and I’ve never seen Helen or David Copley. I don’t know what it’s like at other family-owned newspapers, but I’ve often thought that odd.
I hate to say it, but I think if you had a Christian on the copy desk — or even someone who once went to a church for a long wedding and got bored and started flipping through the Bible in the back of the pews — you wouldn’t have made this error.
The About New York column yesterday, about an imagined conversation with God at a Manhattan diner, referred incorrectly to the Bible to which the thickness of the menu was likened. It is the King James Version, not St. James.
The New York Times newsroom apparently needs to work on diversity hiring that is more than skin deep.
The Senate today confirmed John Roberts to be chief justice of the Supreme Court by a vote of 78-22. I must confess that he got more Democrat support than I predicted. I suspect this is because Roberts ended up replacing the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and not the retiring Sandra Day O’Connor.
The talk is that President Bush will announce O’Connor’s replacement early next week — and I believe it will go much worse for that nominee, whoever he or she may be. If 22 Democrats won’t vote for Roberts, they won’t vote for anyone Bush nominates. And I suspect that a good number of the Democrats who voted for Roberts did so simply so that their opposition to the next nominee will appear to be principled.
Neil Cavuto is interviewing Congressman Barney Frank on the DeLay indictment and the corrupt Republicans. The criticism is coming from a guy whose gay lover was operating an “escort service” out of the congressman’s apartment.
Couldn’t they have gotten a stand-up Democrat who doesn’t have some taint of scandal of some sort to appear on TV?
GOP majority leader Tom DeLay has been indicted for violating a Texas campaign finance law.
I don’t know if DeLay is guilty, but I’m more than a little bit skeptical because this prosecutor has a history of using the law for partisan gain.
Among the politicians he has tangled with is Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. [District Attorney Ronnie] Earle accused her of using her previous office as state treasurer for personal and political purposes. But he abruptly dropped his case in 1994 before it could go to trial.
It’s been said that you can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich — it will be interesting to see what evidence Earle has come up with. The explanations that I’ve seen so far don’t prove much of anything.
The New York Times isn’t putting its editorials behind its TimesSelect wall of silence — maybe it should. An editorial in today’s Times urges readers to “connect the dots” on global warming and its influence on hurricanes.
Hurricanes derive their strength from warm ocean waters. Ocean temperatures have been rising over the last 100 years, along with atmospheric temperatures. Hurricanes have therefore become bigger and more destructive and are likely to grow even more violent in the future.
This suggests that there is is a straight line trend upward in hurricane strength over the past 100 years in line with warming ocean temperatures. Unfortunately this is wrong.
Major hurricanes (3,4,5) by decade:
1901-1910: 4
1911-1920: 7
1921-1930: 5
1931-1940: 8
1941-1950: 10
1951-1960: 8
1961-1970: 6
1971-1980: 4
1991-2000: 5
2001-2004: 3
If you can see a linear trend upward, well, then you’re not really interested in reality — or a member of the Times editorial board.
The New York Times yesterday published an article assailing John Roberts over a memo that he wrote criticizing the Supreme Court’s decision in New York Times v. Sullivan.
There was just one problem with the article — Roberts didn’t write the memo that was the basis of the article, Bruce Fein did.
An article yesterday about Judge John G. Roberts Jr.’s views on libel law attributed a critique of a Supreme Court decision to him erroneously. Mr. Roberts did criticize the decision, New York Times v. Sullivan, in a 1985 memorandum. But a separate unsigned 30-page critique that was among the papers released from his years as a lawyer in the Reagan administration was not his; it was written by Bruce Fein, who was general counsel for the Federal Communications Commission in the Reagan administration. A corrective article appears today, here. (Go to Article)
Unfortunately, the Times’ link to the corrective article also points to the erroneous article. You can read that article here.
I’d be curious to hear the backstory on this mistake. What made the Times believe the unsigned memo was authored by Roberts. Was this an honest mistake? Most newspapers I’d give the benefit of the doubt, but this seems to be the type of shoddy work I’d imagine that Bill Keller’s minions would do, so, according to the Keller standard, it must be the worst explanation I can think of.
*UPDATE* A letter posted at Romenesko’s Media blog poses the same question.
9/28/2005 3:14:09 PM
From JOHN WALTER: Missing from the astonishing New York Times correction on their Roberts libel memo story is any hint of WHO mistakenly identified the memo’s author. One is sent scrambling back to yesterday’s text, only to find that the original story quotes no source on this; it just states his authorship as fact. Does that mean Adam Liptak reached a false conclusion himself, finding the document among other papers; if so, isn’t it the Times correction formula to say “Due to a reporter’s error”? Or, instead, was Liptak misled by Someone Who Had an Agenda — and the Times just ‘fessed up to this yet?
I don’t expect that we’re going to find out the answer to this question.
27
Sep
Are the hospital administrators jealous of all the attention?
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Idiots in a West Yorkshire, Great Britain, hospital have attempted to ban people from cooing at babies.
A West Yorkshire hospital has banned visitors from cooing at new-born babies over fears their human rights are being breached and to reduce infection.
A statement from Calderdale Royal Hospital in Halifax said staff had held an advice session to highlight the need for respect and dignity for patients.
On one ward there is a doll featuring the message: “What makes you think I want to be looked at?”
[snip]
Debbie Lawson, neo-natal manager at the hospital’s special care baby unit, said: “Cooing should be a thing of the past because these are little people with the same rights as you or me.
Debbie Lawson obviously suffers from low self-esteem — which in this case appears to be the same as good common sense.
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